The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Work of the presently named inventors, to the extent it is described in this background section, as well as aspects of the description that may not otherwise qualify as prior art at the time of filing, are neither expressly nor impliedly admitted as prior art against the present disclosure.
Some networking applications require switching between a large number of ports. For example, a typical data center includes a large number of servers, and switches or forwarding systems to communicatively couple the servers to outside network connections, such as backbone network links. As another example, a high-volume website server system can include a large number of web servers, and switches to communicatively couple the web servers to backbone network links.
In these and similar switching applications, network traffic within a switching or forwarding system should be load balanced among various components of the switch while maintaining the ability to accommodate traffic which has different attributes.